"Without shame there'd be no standards"

This fear sits under most of the others. If you stop shaming your children, they'll grow up spoiled. If you stop shaming your staff, they'll coast. If society stops shaming bad behaviour, there'll be more of it. And if you stop shaming yourself, which was chapter 4, you'll go to seed. Shame, in this picture, is a wall holding back chaos.

I take the fear seriously, because what it's protecting matters. Children do need limits. Work does need to be done properly. People who do harm should be told so, and should face consequences. If giving up shaming meant giving up any of that, I'd tell you to keep shaming.

It doesn't mean that, because shame was never doing the work of upholding standards. Guilt was doing it, along with consequences and the wish to stay in good standing with people we respect. All of those stay.

The criminologist John Braithwaite made this distinction for whole societies. He argued that communities express disapproval in two different ways. One treats the offender as a bad person, marks them, and pushes them out. The other condemns the act firmly while treating the offender as a decent person who did a bad thing and who is expected back. His claim was that the first kind produces more crime and the second kind less, because people who've been cast out have nothing left to lose and nobody left to disappoint. The theory is argued over in its details. The central idea fits what the inmate study in chapter 7 found, and I think it fits families and offices as well.

So here is what holding someone to a standard looks like without shaming. It has four parts, and you've met three of them already. You say what happened, in terms a stranger would agree with. You say what it cost. You say what you expect now, including any consequence. And you make it clear there's a way back, so that once the thing is put right, it's over.

An example. A sixteen-year-old said he was at a friend's house and was in fact at a party across town. The shaming version writes itself. "You're a liar. I can't trust a word you say. I don't know who you are any more."

The other version might go like this. "You told me you were at Tom's and you were at a party in Eastfield. I rang Tom's mother, and I was frightened when you weren't there. Lying to me about where you are is serious, because I can't help you if I don't know where you are. You're not going out next weekend. After that we start again, and I want to be told the truth even when I won't like it."

Compare the two. The second is tougher. It contains an actual consequence, which the first didn't, and it names the offence more exactly. What it leaves out is the verdict on his character and the suggestion that something between you is permanently broken. He's been given a clear account of the damage, a cost, and a way back. The first version gives him a label and a reason to get better at lying.

Parents sometimes worry that the second version lets the child off emotionally, that he ought to feel bad and the label is what makes him feel it. He will feel bad. He's been told he frightened you, and he's lost a weekend. That's guilt, and it's the feeling you want him to have, because guilt is about the lie and points towards telling the truth next time. The label would add shame on top, and chapter 5 described where shame goes. He'd most likely spend the evening furious with you, which is a way of not thinking about the lie at all.

Consequences aren't shaming. A grounding, a formal warning, a failed probation, even a dismissal can be delivered with respect for the person. I'd guess you know someone who was sacked decently and someone who was sacked cruelly. The decision was the same in both cases. The difference lay in whether the person was still treated as a person on the way out.

The same reasoning applies online, where the objection is usually "but some people deserve it". Sometimes a public figure or an institution does something that ought to be criticised in public, loudly, and I'm not suggesting anyone go quiet about that. Criticise the act as hard as the facts allow. The thing to watch for is the point where the crowd moves from what the person did to what the person is, and from asking for a remedy to enjoying the pain. When a private individual is facing ten thousand strangers, no way back is on offer, and the ten-thousandth comment adds nothing to their understanding. Before joining in, ask what your post gives the person to do. If the answer is nothing, you're taking the fourth exit from chapter 5 along with a crowd, and standards have little to do with it.

Standards survive the end of shaming, and I think they're better served by it. A correction that carries no contempt can be heard, because the listener isn't busy defending their right to exist.